‘In Somerset, we want people to live healthy and independent lives, supported by thriving and connected communities, with timely and easy access to high quality and efficient support when they need it’. We want people to live their best lives and we plan to achieve this through a whole system personalised care approach.
What is Personalised Care?
Understanding ‘what matters to you’ and what an individual’s strengths, experiences and needs are, is central to personalised care. Personalised care is an approach which means that people have choice and control over their physical and mental health and the way their care is planned and delivered – just as they do in other areas of their lives. A one-size-fits-all health and care system simply cannot meet the increasing complexity of people’s needs and expectations.
Why does Personalised Care matter?
Personalised care is based on what matters to people and their individual strengths, needs and priorities. Personalised care helps a wide range of people make decisions about managing their health, so they can live the life they want to live, based on what matters to them, as well as the evidence-based, good quality information from the health and care professionals who support them. It supports people to be treated as individuals whose knowledge, values, preferences, family and social circumstances are seen as being of crucial importance when deciding how to manage their care and support. At its core, personalised care is about ‘what does a good life look like for you’.
Personalised care represents a new relationship between people, professionals and the health and care system and provides a positive shift in power and decision making that enables people to feel informed, have a voice, to be heard and to be connected to each other and their communities. Evidence tells us that people are more likely to have improved outcomes and are less likely to be unhappy with their care and support when they have been involved in planning what is right for them. Other benefits include better understanding of health systems and health language, improved job satisfaction for health workers and improved access to care for all.
What does Personalised Care look like?
The NHS has developed a comprehensive model of personalised care. It says that people can access personalised care through 6 different approaches:
- Patient choice
- Shared decision making
- Supported self-management and self-care
- Personalised care and support planning
- Social prescribing and community-based support
- Personal health budgets and integrated personal budgets
Personalised Care Survey
We would like to know and understand more about peoples’ knowledge, understanding, views and experiences of personalised care in Somerset. We have created an online survey to gather as much insight as possible to ensure that individuals’ and patients’ voices are present and embedded in our work from the very beginning. We would be very grateful if you could share this email, with the following online survey link, with your networks and/or your organisations so we can hear as much useful feedback as possible. In the survey, we have also asked if people would like to join either/both a one-off focus group and a working group, to help us to develop our ideas for service improvement.
The survey can be found here: https://response.questback.com/nhssomerseticb/ngwtqdtmve
